Time magazine was also at yesterday’s press conference… or was it? All the quotes in this piece up today on Time.com are from the very same press conference I attended. Granted, celebs tend to say pretty much the same things at many of these PR events, but these quotes are precisely the same.
But then there’s this:
Moore was… sporting his trademark hat, jeans and sport coat.
Except he wasn’t. He was wearing a suit, and no hat. (The photo of Moore on that Time.com page is not from yesterday’s conference.) Why would anyone lie about something like that? Maybe Time sent a freelancer to cover the event and then had a staffer write it up, or maybe the writer of this piece was supposed to attend but blew it off, and then just borrowed a transcript of the conference from another journo. But whatever the case, why lie about something so inconsequential and so easily verifiable? It’s bizarre.
(Technorati tags: Michael Moore, Time magazine)
That sounds like one of those errors that eventually tripped up Jayson Blair.
Gonna admit something here. I watched a good deal of this film when it was posted on You Tube. Probably missed about the last 16 minutes because it was taken off.
My impressions, it’s a film that needs to be told. The healthcare crisis in this country is out of control. It’s how it was told in the film that bothered me a bit. I have always been a Moore fan. Although I was not overly fond of 9/11 I thought that Columbine was one of the best films I have seen.
My problem with this film, and 9/11 is that the film is totally one sided. The best documentaries are those that place doubt in the audience, allowing them to use their noggins come up with their own conclusion. Sicko comes straight from the head of Moore, and does not wander from it.
I was also a little bothered with how Anti-American the film was. I will be the first one to tell you that our country is in trouble. But Sicko , unlike Moore’s other films, is just a constant assault, claiming how every other country is better off than we are. Hell, there’s a scene with Moore standing in front of statue of Marx with a look of adoration in his eyes. It’s as if he wants to make love to it. The original ideas of Marx, and Communism for that matter, were brilliant. The problem is that these ideas of Utopia will never work without people having rights taken away. Now I know, we seem to be having rights taken away here also, but at least Moore can give us a more balanced view of the world.
Having said all of this, I realize that my views may be biased. I just could not see how this film can rank up there with some of his best work. I really did not even find it that humorous, something that Moore has always done well.
As Moore said in the press conference I attended the other day (I’ll post more quotes from that soon), the HMOs and big pharma get their side of the story told every damn day in the mainstream media. This film brings balance to that.
The film is not anti-American, and neither is Moore. If he were anti-American, he’d move to one of those other countries! Dissent IS American, and wanting America to be the best it can be is American! Selling off this country to the highest bidder — as has happened with health care and HMOs — is what us unAmerican.
Is there any chance that this could be ironic? Especially since Moore pokes a whole lotta fun at our misconceptions about socialism? (After all, no one complains about our socialized police departments and school systems.)
To me, the film seemed like one giant call to Americans to leave the country if they want to live, not a film about the current crisis in this country. Also, as with 9/11, it seems that Moore is slacking off. There does not seem to be that extra effort to create something meaningful. It just all seems to be thrown out there. This is not a bad film, but compared to his earlier films, I even loved The Big One, Sicko seems a bit contrite. If it actually causes people to take action, which I doubt it will, then it will have served a purpose
It’s not a call to leave the country, it’s a call to CHANGE the country, to make it better than it is.
That may have been the intentions but the film just does not come across that way to me.